In my previous blog post, I lamented the fact that “Star Wars” is officially switching from one continuity to two (“Legends” and the new Disney-overseen continuity), marking the end of the most famous “one big story” franchise in pop culture. That doesn’t mean I reject all multiple-continuity franchises and reboots, though. In fact, I’m a huge fan of the franchise that is perhaps the most extreme example: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” marked its 30th anniversary on Monday, and it’s a fascinating example of how one core idea can spring in so many different directions — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Springing from “Tales of the TMNT” Volume 2 came four four-issue miniseries, one featuring each Turtle. “Leonardo: Blind Sight” (2006) launches from Issue 5, where Leo gets temporarily blinded by a Shredder Elite and accidentally kills a homeless man, and “Raphael: Bad Moon Rising” (2007) grows out of Issue 7, where Raph saves rebellious teen Shadow from a werewolf cult. “Michelangelo: The Third Kind” (2008) takes place in the six-month gap during “TMNT” Volume 4, Issue 5, when humanity deals (very poorly, it turns out) with the peaceful alien visitors, while “Donatello: The Brain Thief” (2009) takes us back to the “TMNT” Volume 2 era to deal with the last vestiges of Baxter Stockman’s villainy.

“TMNT” long ago taught us that, in the end, life is at best bittersweet, and that’s how I’d describe the last year-and-a-half of “Tales of the TMNT” Volume 2, which delivered some outstanding issues but ultimately ended with many threads unresolved. Still, at least it delivers a major moment in the dark Mirage Turtles future that had been hinted at so many times: Dan Berger’s Issue 69 (“Dark Shadows”) shows the Utroms evacuating many humans as the ocean levels rise, and it shows Shadow taking a rowboat to various NYC buildings in this future of wiped-out coastal cities. While it is by no means a tidy bow on the Mirage Future mythos, it at least is a juicy nugget for speculative analyses on the Mirage saga’s future such as Mark Pellegrini’s excellent essay over at TMNT Entity.

The 2008 batch of “Tales of the TMNT” Volume 2 was defined in two major ways: One, editor Dan Berger began informing readers of where each tale takes place on the timeline; and two, Jim Lawson began regularly contributing artwork. With Volume 4 producing no more than one comic per year at this point, Lawson was free to draw eight of the 12 “Tales” issues in 2008.

Part of the purpose of “Tales of the TMNT” Volume 2 was to go back and fill in all those little story gaps that cropped up in 20-plus years of dozens of writers contributing odds and ends to the “TMNT” mythology. If there was a theme to the issues of 2007, when Steve Murphy handed off editorial duties to Dan Berger, it was going back to the source material and filling in key story elements. Mostly, this led to an enrichment of the grand story, but …

In 2006, Mirage Volume 4 stopped its bimonthly publishing schedule and went to a trickle-out approach, but that same year, “Tales of the TMNT” Volume 2 continued as a monthly and put out more consistently compelling work than in its first two years.

For the editors at Mirage Comics, it was both a blessing and a curse that most of their readership got hooked on TMNT through the cartoons and Archie comics: A blessing because they got new readers, a curse because a lot of those readers had a hard time differentiating between the original material and the licensed material. Many letters in Mirage Volume 4 and “Tales of the TMNT” Volume 2 request appearances by non-Mirage characters ranging from Ace Duck to Ninjara, and I can sense the deep sigh and 10-count before each of Peter Laird’s responses.

After a 14-year absence from the big screen and probably a half-dozen near misses at a “TMNT IV” being made, the Turtles finally returned in 2007 with the lazily titled yet pretty darn good “TMNT.”The film, from writer-director Kevin Munroe and Imagi animation studio, is a continuation from the 1990s trilogy, but also a fresh start due to the animated approach. There are things I wish it would’ve done differently, but 30 years after the Turtles’ invention, it’s clear we’ll never get a completely faithful Mirage-comics adaptation, and this movie will remain as close as we’ll get, with the exception of the Turtles Prime sequence in 2009’s “Turtles Forever.”

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III” (1993) is so maligned by fans and non-fans alike that it’s possible that snarky blog and YouTube reviews are the only reason it gets re-watched at all. Certainly, I’m not here to defend this movie – obviously, it was done on the cheap compared to the first two films, and it’s the only Turtles film that doesn’t stand up on the first viewing, let alone repeat viewings. The case I’ll attempt to make is this: Yes, “TMNT III” is bad, but it’s not COMPLETELY without merit, and it might even be slightly better than “TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze.” … In some ways. … If you kind of squint and look at it out of the corner of your eye.